Dr Andrew Hesketh

I enjoy investigating and trying to understand biological systems and processes through the analysis and interpretation of genome-wide –omics data sets.

This has grown out of a long-standing interest in studying the regulation of metabolism in microorganisms with biotechnological applications (yeast and streptomycetes), and the analysis of bacterial antibiotic resistance, and has involved a transition from full-time wet-lab research to full-time computational biology work.

These days, my time is divided fairly equally between work on projects involving bacterial data sets and those originating from fungal and higher eukaryotic systems. My wet-lab research experience, which has included collection of data for proteomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics studies, ensures that I am fully aware of the challenges and effort required to generate experimental data.

On the computational and data analysis side of things, my skills and experience have been built up over the last 15 years or so, starting with research positions at the John Innes Centre (Norwich, UK) and the Cambridge Systems Biology Centre (University of Cambridge, UK) and continuing in my position here at Brighton Genomics.

R, together with its extensive library of open-source software packages, is the workhorse for most of my data analysis tasks, but I also use a range of open-source unix-based software tools, particularly for analysis pipelines involving next generation sequencing data.